SALLY AND JENNY'S 50 FAVOURITE A-B GEN STORIES

Let's begin by defining terms. We (Sally and Jenny, two B7 fans who have
only ever met in cyberspace) decided to put together an annotated list of
our favourite (a more subjective and accurate claim than 'the best') Blake's
7 gen stories (general fan fiction) centred around the interaction between
Avon and Blake. These stories are known as A-B stories - not to be confused
with A/B stories (slash), which focus on a sexual relationship between Avon
and Blake, or A stories (smarm), which focus on an emotional but not
explicitly sexual relationship between Avon and Blake. Some of the stories
we've included here are pure smarm but others aren't, so we chose A-B as the
general heading for the list. This large project got under way on the day
Jenny completed her collection of A/B stories, when she changed her basic
mindset from "I don't read gen" to "Hmm, maybe I do read gen" and asked
Sally to recommend some A-B. Sally introduced her to the stories of Linda
Knights, Marian Mendez and Sheila Paulson. Jenny raved about them on the
Freedom City list. Sarah Thompson, list-maker extraordinaire, suggested that
we put it in writing ... and the rest is bibliography.

We started by asking the inhabitants of Freedom City for their faves, then
worked our way through most of the 164 A-B stories in Sarah's GUIDE TO B7
GEN, along with a bundle of other stories that we discovered for ourselves.
Along the way we realised we were developing our own idiosyncratic
definition of A-B. In Sarah's guide, A-B indicates stories where Avon and
Blake are the main characters - for example, Sarah lists Anne Collins
Smith's 'Shoot Feds and Dodge' as A-B, because it's a parody of Dr Seuss's
'Green Eggs and Ham' in the form of a dialogue between Blake and Avon, but
she doesn't list Lillian Shepherd's THE
MACHIAVELLI FACTOR as A-B because it
follows the separate adventures of the full third season crew, even though
Shepherd incorporates a lyrical and powerful account of Avon and Blake
sorting out their differences.

For us, conversely, A-B means stories that in some way explore or expand the
series characterisation of Avon and Blake, so we were happy to include
stories about the whole crew, as long as those stories centred around Avon
and Blake. We like Avon and Blake (in case you hadn't noticed), so, while
there are some comic stories here, you won't find any stories that just
plain take the micky out of them. And in our version of A-B the massacre at
Gauda Prime is usually survived or averted, unless the story is very, very
well-written.

The process of collaborating on the list was startlingly easy - especially
given that Sally reluctantly but firmly believes that, from what we see on
the screen, the entire B7 crew are apparently under a vow of perpetual
chastity, which means that all adult and slash pairings except
Tarrant/Servalan are AU, whereas Jenny equally firmly believes that A/B
slash is implicit in the TV series. (It's just that the BBC couldn't show
explicit homosexuality during family viewing time in the late 70s and early
80s, right?) However, unlike Our Heroes, we never argued: although we didn't
agree about every story, we could always agree to disagree.

Our main problem was the sheer volume of good A-B gen. Fairly early on, we
decided to restrict ourselves to stories that had been published in print
zines before 2000 but even then, we found it hard to settle on fifty
favourites, so we added the Bonus List ... and we remain convinced that
there are some great stories that we've missed. But there are plenty of
great stories here, ranging from prequels to PGPs, from hurt/comfort to
politics, from comedy to Gen For Slash Fans - in short, something for
everyone.

Some of the out of print stories (and many more) can be found at the
following sites:

All archives are being added to continually, so others both on the list -
and maybe some that we haven't seen - may appear in the future.

We want to thank all those dedicated gen zine writers and editors, the
Freedom City members who offered suggestions, Pat Fenech who filled in some
gaps and, most of all, Sarah Thompson, not only for the amazing amount of
work that went into her definitive gen guide but also for generously giving
us access to her gen collection. And we hope you enjoy browsing through this
list as much as we enjoyed writing it.